As one Guardian journalist recently discovered, constructing an article from material you find on the web is unsafe – a solid-looking story can turn out to be the sort of edifice that collapses within days of its completion.

NO WAI, RLY?

So let’s start with what we’re trying to do. We’re operating on a simple premise: the media manufactures reality, and so do we. The difference is that we tell you about it. So when we manufacture a tiny piece of reality, and the media turn it into True Fact, we’ll post it here.

Still not clear what we’re on about? Perhaps an example would help: our first hoax. It’s a small one, because we’re still learning, and we wanted to see if it would work. It worked.

On 31st March, a light plane crashed into a housing estate in Kent, England. The plane was a Cessna Citation. This much is true. But if you read The Sun, you’d also believe that Sir Alan Sugar owns a Cessna Citation.

He doesn’t. But because the Sun used Wikipedia as their reference, they picked up a change we had made to the Wikipedia entry about the aircraft.

Some spoilsport reverted our change after a few hours, but that’s fine: we’re not out to destroy Wikipedia, we’re just interested in manufacturing the media’s view of the world.